1. Field of the Invention:
The present invention relates (a) to a method for producing more outstanding, three dimensional facial features on a soft cloth doll and (b) to a doll and its face produced by the method. The method also has applicability for making three dimensional features in other cloth items.
2. The Prior Art:
Soft cloth dolls have been made for centuries. Many methods have been developed to produce facial features. All construct the basic head by filling a spherical, ellipsoidal or other similar shaped head cavity made of cloth with a soft substance such as down or fabric. The methods, which are explained in more detail in applicant's U.S. Pat. No. 4,629,441, fall within four categories: applique and embedment, needle modeling, trapunto and seamed heads and faces. Each of these methods can be used alone or together, but all suffer from an inability to form clear, life-like facial features without distracting stitches on the facial surface.
Applicant's earlier U.S. Pat. No. 4,629,441 discloses an improved method of forming a doll face. Desired features are outlined using meltable fuser attachments threads between a front and rear piece of fabric. The front piece stretches but the rear piece does not stretch. After the adhesive is made to hold the two sheets of fabric together, one inserts soft material between the two sheets of fabric within the outline of the feature. The front sheet bulges outward in the shape of the pattern.
Improvements in applicant's pending applications included using adhesive disks to form the eyes and surrounding the adhesive disks with a circular cord to make the eye sockets bulge. Another improvement used a sheet of adhesive material with various punched-out locations that could receive filling.
All of applicant's previous devices rely on the ability of the regions inside the fused locations to accept filling at high pressures so that the feature can be greatly packed to protrude further than other, less-pressurized regions. Because several adjacent features are formed, and these regions all have attachments holding the front and rear pieces of fabric together, the regions are stable. The stretchable front sheet of fabric allows the tightly packed features to protrude in a life-like manner as human lips, eyes and other parts of the face might do.
A minor drawback with applicant's previous doll faces occurs only when extremely great protrusion is desired. Although the front sheet of fabric is stretchable so it can protrude and the rear sheet does not stretch, the rear sheet is only backed by the filling of the head. Large general, forces on the rear sheet of fabric from the filling in the head tend to flatten the face to some degree so that the features do not protrude as much as may be desired.